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Here’s a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren’t on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self—one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people’s successes. It’s a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I direct ambitious films that capture the Zeitgeist? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

The unrest about smartphones and social-media addiction has been growing for years and shows no signs of abating. I have felt the panic myself, and so, this past July, with a book deadline looming, I got off of social media. The break started with X, which was my biggest problem, but, by the end of August or so, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much anything that allowed me to argue with strangers had been deleted from my phone. Before this, I was spending roughly ten hours a day looking at my phone or sitting at my desktop computer. I didn’t need that number to come down, but, when I checked my weekly status report, I wanted all the brightly colored little bars that track the number of hours I’d spent on time-wasting apps to be relocated to the word-processing app that I use to write my books.

The plan worked, more or less. I finished a draft of the book on time. But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized, at least not in a noticeable way. I was especially hoping that I would start reading more books, because I have found that enviable prose prompts me to try to write my own, not necessarily out of a sense of inspiration but rather out of fear that if I don’t hurry up and start typing, I’ll fall behind. And yet, the chief effect, I found, was that I simply didn’t know what was happening in the world. That was nice enough, but all those books I had hoped to read never found their way into my hands.

One of the more common doomsday scenarios about social media goes something like this: an internet-addicted public, hooked on the dopamine hits of engagement and the immediate satisfaction of short-form video, loses its ability to read books and gets stupider and more reactionary as a result. Frankly, I am not immune to this fear—not only because it is my job to write articles and books but because I think it’s good for people to read books, full stop. And the statistics regarding our collective reading habits are not pretty. In a recent National Literacy Trust survey of seventy-six thousand children, aged eight to eighteen, only one in five said they read something daily in their free time, a historically low mark for the survey. In a National Endowment for the Arts poll conducted in 2022, the number of adults who said they had read at least one book in the past year dipped below fifty per cent, down roughly ten per cent from a decade before.

Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history when people have spent more time reading words, even if it’s just text messages on their phones. We can agree that most of this reading is less edifying than books are, but I do wonder if the downturn in book reading, and its relationship to our online habits, might be more complicated than we are inclined to conclude. It is, for instance, much easier to find information now—information we might once have looked for in books, say, and also information about the books we might consider reading. Maybe, in the age of the internet, many of us, as informed readers, only want to read one book, tailored very specifically to our interests, every couple of years.

Does that explain a lot of what’s happening? Probably not; more likely, most of us are just stuck in our phones more. Still, I do believe we need to change how we think about literacy, and what it means. Imagine a guy; let’s call him Dave. He’s a busy lawyer who lives in the Midwest and has a keen interest in American military history. On Reddit, he finds a community of people who share their favorite titles on the subject. Over time, in this forum, Dave learns which of his fellow-posters are aligned with his own tastes. He becomes choosier about which books he reads—a more efficient reader, in a sense, though one who may read fewer books. Dave also listens to podcasts, watches long YouTube videos, and even participates in live-stream seminars about his favorite moments from the Battle of Antietam, or whatever. Is Dave less informed—less literate?—than he would have been had he read three books that year instead of two?

A second, related question: can our online lives actually replicate that craggy, slow feeling of an in-person book club or classroom? Or is there something about the internet’s recommendation architecture and its instant provision of information that turns everything into a speedy optimization run?

I started thinking about this question after reading a list by the writer Celine Nguyen titled “Notes on being a writer in the 21st century.” Nguyen, who publishes heady critical essays on Substack, has some appealingly contrarian thoughts. For instance, she points out that “well before AI slop, we had human-generated slop.” And she makes a convincing case that social media and the internet might cause people to read smarter, even if it also causes them to read fewer books:

A lot of the books that I now think of as foundational to how I see the world, I found out about because people would post on Reddit or Twitter. That is something special about the internet: That you do not need to be in the right social context where these things are automatically accessible to you.

Nguyen is hardly alone in this experience. BookTok, the sprawling and informal literary community on TikTok, has pushed many people to read outside their usual interests. You don’t have to dig deep into X, Reddit, or Instagram to find reading suggestions that would never appear on the year-end lists in newspapers or magazines, or on the rolls of the major annual awards. Obscure literary titles are reaching people they might not have reached before.

But, if we accept Nguyen’s proposition, and conclude that some of us are slogging through fewer bad books and getting more quickly to the stuff we like, does that actually constitute an improvement in reading culture?

Let’s place our hypothetical friend Dave, the military-history buff, in a book club that requires him to read a whole bunch of books he might have never picked up—the majority of which he finds pointless and a waste of his time. The club also provides a community of in-person friends with whom he can debate and disagree and even argue about what book should be next on the queue. Dave might not read many more books than he would have without the club, and he may enjoy the ones he reads less; the quality of the information he’s receiving may even deteriorate. He might find himself back in the same Reddit threads, hunting down things that are tailored to his interests.

But there are social benefits to reading something together. Someone might be able to jolt him out of his narrow tranche of interests. The experience of reading can benefit from the rockier mental terrain that books provide; the boredom and impatience that longer texts sometimes inspire can help push and prod one’s thinking more than things that are perfectly distilled.

I asked Nguyen whether she felt that her vision of a more finely tuned and online reading public might obviate the need for the in-person book club or literary society or writing workshop. She said that although social media and learning about books through the internet likely accelerated exploration, it also could, in her experience, restrict people almost entirely to their own tastes. “You have the ability to create a filter bubble that’s more impermeable,” she said.

Social media does create a powerful consensus—on the internet, everything tends to grow quickly toward one source of light— and an argument can be made that a slower, more fractured network of in-person, localized arguments might ultimately offer up more intellectual variety. When I asked Nguyen about this, she mentioned the Ninth Street Women, a group of Abstract Expressionist artists who worked in the postwar period, and her own displaced nostalgia for the idea of artists and writers meeting in physical spaces with similar goals in mind. “It just inherently feels more vibrant if it’s in a physical space than if you Substack notes at the same time that all your friends are posting on Substack notes,” she said. But she also pointed out that such movements tend to be quite insidery, and that a lot of the most successful writers on platforms like Substack are people who might not exactly fit into the New York City literati. This seems undeniably true to me. It might be nice to go to the same bars and contribute to the same small journals and stare very seriously at the same art work in the same galleries, but such a life feels both anachronistic and annoying today.

In another of her notes for writers, Nguyen proclaims:

I, controversially, am pro-social media. If you are writing about art, you just make all your social media about contemporary art and art critics and new art releases, and you create this funneled world that reinforces the thing you’re trying to do.

I have tried similar tactics in the past, especially when I was writing about specific subjects, such as education policy or A.I. But what I found wasn’t really a sharpening of insight, but, rather, a tightened focus on the social-media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on any given topic. Even in moments when I wasn’t writing directly about some tweet I had seen, I was still gesturing toward it. Writing, in this form, felt more like sticking a comment bubble on an aggregated stream of news stories, social-media posts, and an assortment of video podcasts. Most pundits—at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters, or on podcasts—are doing some form of this. Taken together, such writing forms “the discourse.”

Aggregation, for what it’s worth, is also what large language models can most capably replicate. ChatGPT can’t report new facts or provide much atmospheric detail, but it can inhale everything that’s been written on a specific subject, organize the material, and present it in an orderly fashion. Nguyen’s advice may be correct, but, if it is—and given the popularity of newsletters and political commentary and the decline of the novel and even the big doorstop biography—the future of human writing would seem to be headed directly into the jaws of the A.I. machine.

How do we respond? Do we seek out formal and stylistic breaks that feel authentically human? Or does everything start to look like slop? And can our attempts to find non-sloppified prose outpace the stylistic variations that the L.L.M.s might be able to generate on their own? Some of the most innovative formal experiments I’ve seen recently have appeared on Substack—including, whatever else you may think of it, Ryan Lizza’s recent serialized, scandalous tell-all about his ex-fiancée, Olivia Nuzzi. Not all writing on social media or in nontraditional forms has turned into slop. But there is value in resisting pure optimization, aggregation, and specialization. Not only for the sake of the humanity of the written word but also because it can be quite lonely at the bottom of a rabbit hole. ♦

Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it’s hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation’s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm that lasted days, after a record-dry autumn. A succession of such tragedies followed—for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels. Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn across Southeast Asia which has left more than a thousand people dead.

The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere’s current load of carbon dioxide and methane. On the three-year moving average by which we measure such things, the Earth is now inching ever-closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature set out as a goal to avoid just a decade ago at the Paris climate talks. And diplomatic events in 2025 did little to ease fears about what’s coming. The thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil—which no one from the Trump Administration attended—just concluded, and the Times described the final document in unusually straightforward terms as “a victory for oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.”

None of this should shock anyone. International climate diplomacy, since its high-water mark at Paris, in 2015, has been besieged by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments, which now include, of course, the United States, historically the Earth’s chief producer of CO₂. I’m going to quote at some length from the speech the American President delivered to a silent U.N. General Assembly in September, because it sums up perfectly both his own imperviousness to fact and the assertiveness of the oil-and-gas world after his Inauguration this year.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

Describing, for instance, his understanding of climate science (invented arguably in its modern form in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then built the computer models allowing us to predict our fate), Donald Trump said, “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, they said, Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said, Global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Then, with regard to modern environmentalism, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world—a consciousness that allowed our air and water to be cleaned up dramatically over recent decades—Trump said, “In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable.”

In service to his vision of the world, the President has spent the year undoing every environmental law he can find. The zeal of his lieutenants—Lee Zeldin, at the Environmental Protection Agency; the former fracking executive Christopher Wright, at the Department of Energy; and others—has been remarkable. They’ve unleashed oil drilling along the coasts, opened up vast new stretches of the interior for coal mining, scrapped laws that attempted to staunch the flow of methane from gas wells into the air. Here’s Wright, on climate science, “Like, it’s a real physical phenomenon. It’s worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that’s climate change, that’s to say, I’m not going to do my homework.”

Indeed, he and his colleagues are working hard to make it impossible for anyone to do their homework. They’ve shut down NASA’s upper Manhattan Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen and other scientists first documented our plight, proposed to shut down the satellites that watch the climate changing, and even planned, in next year’s budget, to shut down the monitoring stations at Mauna Loa and elsewhere which keep track of how much carbon is pouring into the atmosphere. It is almost certainly the greatest collective act of scientific vandalism in recent American history. It would be easy, and accurate, to call 2025 the low point of human action on the climate crisis.

And yet, it’s at least possible that Trump and company’s assault on environmental norms is more shrill than confident. Because something else happened this year that gives at least some hope for the future: the remarkable rise in clean, renewable energy, which set every kind of record in 2025. In May, in a rush to get solar farms up before a subsidies-for-growth policy ended, China was installing an average of three gigawatts of solar capacity a day—the U.S. installed a total of twenty-one gigawatts in the first three quarters of this year. China, which is currently at the center of the renewable revolution, broke its own records with ease: after surpassing its 2030 targets in 2024, it set new targets for 2035 this year, including a renewable-electricity share exceeding thirty per cent. It’s not alone: India met a 2030 target early, too. As Reuters reported in July, fifty per cent of installed electric capacity in the world’s most populous country ran on something other than fossil fuels. That’s not the same thing as saying it generated half its power from the sun and wind, but India was definitely trending in the right direction: coal use dropped nearly three per cent in the first half of the year.

Similar transitions have been occurring almost everywhere: in November, the Energy Information Administration reported that California used seventeen per cent less natural gas to produce electricity than it had the year before. Pakistan, which has seen a rapid solar buildout in the past two years, reached an agreement with Qatar to divert twenty-four liquified natural-gas cargoes in 2026 after domestic demand fell—with Pakistan bearing the loss if Qatar sells the cargoes below contract price. They simply don’t need the imports anymore. All told, through September, we generated almost a third more energy from the sun this year than last.

All this flies in the face of Trump’s call for U.S. “energy dominance” from oil and gas. He’s tried, with some success, to build that dominance on the back of tariffs—when the E.U. and Japan agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of liquefied natural gas, he cut their threatened tariff rates substantially, in what could be described only as a shakedown. He’s also done his best to wreck the prospects of clean energy, not only gutting President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was designed to help America catch up with China’s green-tech lead, but also trying to halt work on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic seaboard. Just weeks ago, he put the kibosh on what would have been America’s largest solar array, in Nevada. And he’s tried to take his case around the world, lecturing leaders about the folly of clean energy.

Here he is again, at the U.N., offering his definitive take on solar and wind power: “By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it’s actually energy. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies.” And this is how he summed up the situation: “And I’m really good at predicting things. . . . I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from this green-energy scam, your country is going to fail.”

Or maybe it’s America that’s in trouble. When historians look back at 2025, I think the story they will tell is that, in the course of just a few months, the U.S. voluntarily surrendered technological and economic primacy to its theoretical chief adversary in the course of just a few months. China’s green-energy exports this year, through July, were one and a half times the size of American oil and gas exports in the same period. From Belem, the view seemed fairly clear. As the Times put it, “Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant. Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years.”

Crucial to this global shift was China, which was selling the technology and often providing the financing. “Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of the time,” the Chinese Vice-Premier, Ding Xuexiang, told the COP 30 delegates. “We need to stay confident, balance such goals as environmental protection, economic development, job creation, and poverty eradication.” China is far from a benign world power, but countries that buy green tech from it will not depend on it going forward, as they would depend on a supplier of gas or coal. Instead, they’ll depend on the sun, which has an enviable record of rising most mornings.

Americans, too, are starting to worry about the domestic effects of relying on fossil fuels. Electricity prices are spiking around the country, up ten per cent as the Trump Administration simultaneously green-lights the endless expansion of juice-sucking data centers and constricts the supply of the cheapest forms of energy. Election results from last month—especially in New Jersey, where the victorious Democrat in the gubernatorial race, Mikie Sherrill, made a strong commitment to renewable power—suggest that voters have woken up to this economic reality. Expect Sherrill’s colleagues across the country to start making much of the new data indicating that some of the states with the lowest power rates, such as Iowa and North Dakota, can often be those with the most wind, sun, and hydropower.

None of this is happening fast enough. But there’s definitely a wild card in what has often seemed like a stacked deck, and it’s increasingly coming into play. Another year will give us a sense of how much the game has been changed. ♦

We hear you—just because it’s lunchtime doesn’t mean you’re slacking off. Lunch is an opportunity to work even harder on your gains. So get ready for the new HealthGreen PunchMax Protein PowerBowl. You need protein. You need all this protein in order to work out. Even if you’re not working out today. Or yesterday. Or tomorrow. You need it because every gram of protein helps you fill the hole in your heart that’s been there since Carrie left you.

Packed with a hundred grams of protein, the PunchMax Protein PowerBowl redefines what food can be. It’s mostly pieces of chicken liver strewn about on a bed of raw tuna arranged over a layer of bulgogi beef perched atop a pile of kinda damp deli turkey slathered with cashew butter and swimming in a puddle of raw milk. All of which is served in our fully recyclable cardboard bowl. It is sopping wet and dripping—with power. Also, it kind of looks like throw-up. PROTEIN throw-up. So carry this waterlogged container back to your desk to harvest all the energy you need to eat it at your desk. Feel the power coursing through your veins and watch a YouTube video about how running a SaaS B2B sales business is just like running the Roman Empire, while you also scroll Carrie’s Instagram on the burner account you made so she’d accept your follow request.

Do you understand what we’ve done? Because I don’t think you do. This is the single most protein-heavy bowl anyone has ever made. The only way it could have more protein in it would be if the bowl itself were made of protein. And trust me, buddy, we tried to make this bowl out of raw ground lamb, but it was just too sticky and also the beta-cuck health department said we couldn’t just hand out bowls made of uncooked meat. Bet the health department doesn’t even bench-press. If you eat the contents of this bowl, you will be able to bench-press. You will bench-press so much it will feel like you’re lifting the weight of knowing that Carrie used to love you for who you were and even once said that she wore perfume only so its scent would get onto you and then other women would know that you were spoken for. You’ll lift so much, you’ll forget the way, at the end, she looked at you, like, “Oh, I think my sister was right about you.”

We know what you need. No one else does. Only us. Don’t listen to Carrie, or to your parents, or to that stupid therapist Carrie recommended. What you need is protein. Delicious, chunky protein. That’s why you can also add protein powder to the bowl. That’s right. Add a little vanilla dust to your slop. Will it taste better? I don’t know. This meal is full of macros. What are macros? Who cares? You don’t need to know. What you need to know is that you are the alpha of this fast-healthy-adjacent bowl purveyor. All the other men here? Mere hobbits. You? You’re Aragorn dressed in L.L. Bean and Clark’s desert boots. You’re the Gandalf of incorporating A.I. into your client’s direct-sales platform. Screw that. You’re frickin’ Sauron, forging the One Ring so you can maximize shareholder value. You are the Lord of the Rings. You definitely know what those books are about. You don’t cry when Sam says, “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.” Carrie! You don’t cry! Shut up, Carrie!

Also, the PunchMax Protein PowerBowl has only one thousand, one hundred and thirty-eight calories. That’s a deal. Because, when you think about it, that’s technically more calories than two McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. But Quarter Pounders have less protein. And also our bowl smells like Brussels sprouts, which is weird because there are ZERO Brussels sprouts in this bowl. Carrie liked Brussels sprouts. Eat more protein powder to dry out the tears!

In conclusion: Protein good. All other food bad. Carrie bad. Protein make brain forget. Protein make brain work good for to make world nice. Available now for a normal price to pay for a to-go lunch: $27.98. ♦

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Maybe, if the country is lucky, the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of Trump v. Barbara because it wants to reiterate something that the Constitution, federal law, and its own previous rulings have already clearly said, just more loudly, so that even the President can hear it: virtually all babies born in America are American citizens. The case is Donald Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling that threw out an executive order he issued in January, in which he declared that a large number of babies born here each year—estimates range to the hundreds of thousands—are not citizens. Why? Because he said so. When the Justices announced, on Friday, that they would hear him out, rather than simply turning the appeal down flat, they didn’t give an explanation. It takes four Justices out of the nine to grant cert (the technical term for taking a case), but their motives might be mixed. Some conservative Justices may want to let the President down easy, with a display of deference before ruling against him, and some liberals may want the opportunity to come down hard in defense of the babies. Maybe the Justices, who are not without vanity, just want to expound a bit. Perhaps they’ve already worked out some resounding phrases in their heads.

All those possibilities would be preferable to another one: that a critical mass of Justices has become convinced that there is a question about birthright citizenship, and that they are willing to upend our long-shared understanding of what it means to be born an American. With this Court, at this moment, it would be reckless to ignore that prospect. Ted Cruz and eight other Republican senators have submitted an amicus brief that largely supports Trump’s order; so have the attorneys general of twenty-four states. Even the more benign rationales for the Supreme Court taking the case carry with them the cost of leaving the impression that birthright citizenship is an unsettled matter. The wait for a ruling in Trump v. Barbara—which will likely come in June or July, after oral arguments this spring—will be one more destabilizing element in our already chaotic national scene.

Another case related to the executive order, Trump v. CASA, was decided by the Court in June, but that one did not address the substance of the order. Instead, it was about whether lower-court judges could use what are known as universal, or nationwide, injunctions to stop it from going into effect. The Court said that they could not. (Trump v. Barbara is a class-action suit, on behalf of babies born after the executive order; this, along with a case brought by Washington and other states, has allowed judges to put a hold on the order even without a universal injunction.) When CASA was argued, the executive order’s opponents suggested that the Administration might never appeal its various lower-court defeats, because it must know that it would lose—the order was so clearly unconstitutional. “If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case,” Justice Elena Kagan said at the time to D. John Sauer, the Solicitor General, who argued that case for the Administration. But, when Justice Gorsuch asked Sauer if he would appeal if Trump lost in the lower courts, Sauer said, “Absolutely.” And he has. The question now is what, if anything, Trump thinks he can win.

The big prize for the White House, of course, would be an end to birthright citizenship, which many conservatives and opponents of immigration have come to deeply resent, with talk of “anchor babies” and demographic doom. Unfortunately for them, birthright citizenship is not some misty, novel concept or expansion of ill-defined rights. It is the hard promise, in plain language, of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizenship to previously enslaved Black Americans but was recognized from the beginning as having a broader effect. The citizenship clause reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The opponents of birthright citizenship hang their arguments, such as they are, on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1898, which was only thirty years after the amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court ruled definitively on the meaning of that phrase in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in California to Chinese immigrants who were precluded from becoming citizens by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Court ruled that the only babies born in the U.S. but not “subject” to its jurisdiction in this sense were those born to “foreign sovereigns” or diplomats (for example, if a French ambassador happened to give birth in the U.S.); or those born on a foreign-government-owned ship within U.S. territorial borders; or those born to “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.” The “single additional exception,” the Court said, was the case of children born to certain Native American tribes, based on treaty relations that they then had with the federal government.

The Native American exception was, at the time, the most consequential, and had its own dark history. It was, however, for the most part done away with as a result of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. One fascinating aspect of Trump v. Barbara will be seeing what Justice Neil Gorsuch—a conservative who is also, somewhat idiosyncratically, an expert on and champion of tribal legal rights—makes of Wong Kim Ark’s legacy. In sum, Wong’s was a landmark case, not an obscure one, and the Court referred back to it in the decades that followed; its majority opinion in a 1957 case, for example, notes that a baby born to parents in the United States illegally “is, of course, an American citizen by birth.” Legislators shared that understanding of birthright citizenship when Congress incorporated the Fourteenth Amendment’s language into federal law, in 1940 and 1952.

Trump’s executive order represents a complete break with that history. It says that a baby is not a citizen if the mother has no legal status, or if her status is legal but only temporary (for example, if she is on a work or student visa), and if the father is not a citizen or legal permanent resident. Incredibly, the Administration, in its petition to the Supreme Court, argues not only that the order is legal but that the Court can uphold it without overruling the Wong Kim Ark precedent, which it claims has been “misread” for more than a hundred years.

In defense of this indefensible position, the Administration notes that Justice Horace Gray, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, mentioned a number of times that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were “resident” or “domiciled” in the United States. But, as the lawyers for the Barbara babies have argued, Gray went further, saying that anyone residing in the U.S. is clearly subject to its jurisdiction and, importantly, that those here just temporarily are subject to it, too. (Again, the narrow exceptions had to do with diplomats, invaders, and Native Americans.) If you are in the U.S. just temporarily, as a tourist or a student, say, you are still bound by American laws and the government’s authority.

Yet the Administration not only acts as if residency is a magic condition but offers a completely illogical and contradictory definition of what residency is. If parental residency is a requirement, then Trump’s lawyers are making a pretty good case for the citizenship of babies whose parents have lived established lives in this country for years or decades—whatever their legal status. But the Administration’s brief slips between the terms “resident” and “lawful permanent resident,” as if they meant the same thing. And if a parent acting unlawfully, perhaps by staying in the U.S. despite a deportation order, precludes a baby’s citizenship, why are the children of native-born criminals unquestionably citizens? (Actually, one might worry about how Trump would answer that question.)

For example, Sarah (as she is known in Court papers), a baby who is one of the parties in Trump v. Barbara, was born in Utah earlier this year to a mother from Taiwan who has lived in the United States for more than a decade and has a student visa. The idea that Sarah is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is absurd on its face. Indeed, this Administration has argued that noncitizens are in some ways hyper-subject to its jurisdiction—that it has more of a right to monitor them and limit their freedoms than it does in the case of citizens.

Still, the focus on residency and legal status may point to a possible consolation prize for Trump in this litigation. He may not end birthright citizenship across the board, but perhaps he can turn the various, differently situated groups affected by his executive order against one another—with parents who are holders of H-1B visas arguing that they should not be grouped in with parents who have no legal status; people who arrived here as children saying that they are more clearly resident than students or people with temporary protected status; and everyone trying to avoid being connected to a country with a travel ban. There is enough division already without such quarrels.

At the same time, Trump’s executive order would affect everyone in America, not only immigrants. How is any baby supposed to prove the citizenship or legal status of its parents? In the months since the CASA decision, the Administration has put together some “guidance” to help answer that question; it’s an unhelpful mishmash of talk about hospitals collecting the parents’ Social Security numbers to check citizenship status (an imperfect system, particularly for green-card holders) when the babies are born and about the production of U.S. passports (which only about fifty per cent of Americans have). Ominously, there is a reference to resolving problems via a national 800 number that will connect parents to “updated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to route them to a self-service option.”

Another possibility is that the Supreme Court could definitively throw out the executive order—but do so in a way that leaves room for Congress, though not the President, to redefine the meaning of the citizenship clause. Or the Court could chip away at the edges, perhaps with some ambiguous language deploring so-called “birth tourism.” At this rate, the Administration’s next move might be to try denying citizenship to babies born in neighborhoods that it says are under occupation by foreign gangs. That Trump was able to push the litigation as far as he has is, in itself, a victory for those who have long campaigned to undermine birthright citizenship. With Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court has made itself a part of the fight. The Justices will now have to either stand by the American babies whom Trump wants the country to disown, or join him in abandoning them. ♦